A History of World Agriculture

A History of World Agriculture
Author: Marcel Mazoyer
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2006-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1583674918

Only once we understand the long history of human efforts to draw sustenance from the land can we grasp the nature of the crisis that faces humankind today, as hundreds of millions of people are faced with famine or flight from the land. From Neolithic times through the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East, in savannahs, river valleys and the terraces created by the Incas in the Andean mountains, an increasing range of agricultural techniques have developed in response to very different conditions. These developments are recounted in this book, with detailed attention to the ways in which plants, animals, soil, climate, and society have interacted. Mazoyer and Roudart’s A History of World Agriculture is a path-breaking and panoramic work, beginning with the emergence of agriculture after thousands of years in which human societies had depended on hunting and gathering, showing how agricultural techniques developed in the different regions of the world, and how this extraordinary wealth of knowledge, tradition and natural variety is endangered today by global capitialism, as it forces the unequal agrarian heritages of the world to conform to the norms of profit. During the twentieth century, mechanization, motorization and specialization have brought to a halt the pattern of cultural and environmental responses that characterized the global history of agriculture until then. Today a small number of corporations have the capacity to impose the farming methods on the planet that they find most profitable. Mazoyer and Roudart propose an alternative global strategy that can safegaurd the economies of the poor countries, reinvigorate the global economy, and create a livable future for mankind.

Farming for Us All

Farming for Us All
Author: Michael Mayerfeld Bell
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780271046327

Farming for Us All gives us the opportunity to explore the possibilities for social, environmental, and economic change that practical, dialogic agriculture presents.

Feeding the World

Feeding the World
Author: Giovanni Federico
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2010-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400837723

In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. Agriculture has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This book, a comprehensive history of world agriculture during this period, explains how these feats were accomplished. Feeding the World synthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature. It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance: environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.

Against the Grain

Against the Grain
Author: Richard Manning
Publisher: North Point Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005-02-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1466823429

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.

Brooklyn's Garden

Brooklyn's Garden
Author: Charles Andrew Ditmas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 62
Release: 1908
Genre: Architecture, Domestic
ISBN:

Views include: Knickerbocker Field Club, Midwood Club, Cortelyou Club, Erasmus Hall High School, Old Vanderbilt Homestead, Ocean and Newkirk Avenues, Albermarle Road, Ditmas Avenue, Tennis Court, Rugby Road near Church Avenue, Beverly Road, Prospect Park Boat House.